Transformance 90 Day Business Turnaround Program

Transformance 90 Day Business Turnaround Program: 90 Day Business Turnaround
For people who want to see their businesses improve, and achieve greater success

Success and Significance Part 2

Success is often associated with people who feel they have everything they want so in that respect you could say that it is often materially based. The success may be visible to all, so in effect success means that you have added value to yourself and by relationships and association, some people around you.

However significance is when you hit the top of the Maslow needs pyramid, because you feel so comfortable and confident about your own success that you can now seek to add value to others.

Sports stars are great examples of this process in action. Some end their careers (perhaps prematurely through injury) and then fail to adapt to their new situation. They miss the previous trappings of success and often decline into a “vicious spiral” which may involve alcohol and drugs. Fortunately many others are inspired to reinvent themselves, to a new sustainable level of success, but that still leaves the “what’s next?” question.

Bill Gates (irrespective of whether you love his software!) created a massive level of success that carried with it huge financial success. In the process you can also say he provided many others with opportunity as employees and partners of Microsoft. So what did he do to? He created the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with a view to giving away a sizeable portion of their wealth to help others. Warren Buffet and more recently Richard Branson have also committed to giving away at least half of their wealth. They are doing this because they have nothing left to prove to themselves or others in the fact that they are successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs.

They are sharing the fruits of their success and are not holding on to wealth just to make sure that they qualify for the next millionaire/billionaire list.

Just a suggestion, but perhaps in order to start moving from success to significance and the desire to add value to others, that you have to:

• ·      really know your purpose in life (and we know how well they teach that in schools, colleges and the workplace)
• ·      have a strong desire and a clear vision to be more than you currently are, by growing towards your maximum potential
• ·      begin planting the seeds that will benefit others by providing them with their own means to grow ”harvests”

Significance, like success is not an overnight journey – it takes time, but it does require steadfast commitment, passion and a strong sense of purpose and direction. Becoming significant will most likely take you from a place of comfort into the great unknown, but that is what makes it challenging and exciting.

In short it is about signing up to something that is bigger than we think we are. But if we start to make the stretch, when we get to the final account we can say we truly lived, loved and made a difference.

Meaning and achievement

Events are happening in all of our lives, at all times. We interpret these events and add our meaning to them, as a result of our experience, conditioning and beliefs. You could say that the meanings we apply to events become our frame of reference to make sense of what is going on.

Some people see things half full and others see them half empty. Both points of view are valid, but one is more empowering than the other.

At one time in my life (I suspect like many other people too) I felt very disempowered and felt that life and events around me were responsible for how I felt and how my successful career was falling apart. In other words I took no responsibility – it was out of my hands and in the hands of everyone else.

Sadly this road leads to one of being a “victim”, disempowerment and possibly depression or worse.

I now term this kind of spiral as one of being insignificant. Insignificance often leads to two unfortunate states. One such state is apathy – “why bother to do anything when I have no personal power?” Another major state that can occur is frustration. At least frustration can lead to a sense that something has to be done. When you reach a point of frustration and say enough is enough then change can happen. When locked in apathy it is literally a moribund state.

Victor Frankl wrote an outstanding book called “Man’s search for meaning” (1959) based upon his experiences in a German Concentration Camp. Most of us cannot imagine the horrors that he witnessed personally on a daily basis. He observed however that “hope” was essential for survival, but so many fellow prisoners slipped into apathy.

By remaining in a state of insignificance and apathy it is a form of complete suppression. The longer you suppress and accept an undesirable situation the harder it is to break free of disempowerment. In fact you may have to relearn empowering things like hope, joy, happiness and love. Fortunately we now know that our brains do have “plasticity” so you really can “teach an old dog new tricks”. Many stroke victims have to do just that – they rewire their brains so that they can regain their lives back. New neural pathways must be created.

OK so there has been a lot of focus in this article on apathy and disempowerment, now what are the real keys to starting on the road to empowerment? Well Frankl quite clearly puts “hope” as an important step in the right direction. Can you attain a sense of being hopeful? If that is a stretch from where you are right now, ask yourself, has anyone else in my situation found way out?  If the answer to that is yes – it can help turn your own beliefs around. You can research, read and often listen to their stories and “model” the steps they took.

The rocket fuel to change and ultimately arriving at achievement is knowing your WHY. I meet so many people who when asked what they have or would like to have as goals, trot out things like “a new car, a new house, money, travel” etc. These things may be true, but often they are the “consumer society” ideas of what you should want. In other words they are someone else’s dreams and goals implanted in your mind (yes advertising really does work!).

To get to your real why, any achievement or goal has to be authentic to you. The attaining of what you want will lead you to the real why, not just to the thing or object but to the actual “end state” you want – it may be freedom, security, self respect, happiness or some other “feeling state”.

So I hope you can see that to break free of insignificance and apathy, you have to find a way to have hope and from that new empowering vantage point, work on your real emotional, driving reasons to attain achievement and significance